People are fooled by FOX though – a lot of Trump supporters will say they only trust FOX et al, and that “the mainstream media” are all liars. And this is not some tiny minority, I’d estimate around 50 million people hold a view something like that given Trump’s continued support.
I don’t agree with the framing that CNN and MSNBC are the FOX of the left; they don’t engage in silly conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods. Or at least you’d have to search hard to find it, whereas for FOX we can take essentially any episode of Hannity or Carlsen.
But yeah, MSNBC in particular will frame events a certain way, and I think that their viewers are unlikely to consider that the situation might not be as clear-cut as they would have it.
Frankly, I think the news media landscape in the US is awful, but not in the typical ways that people say. US viewers have a strong cultural distrust of the media, so journalists are often breaking their back trying to appear balanced, giving undue reverence to politicians that are talking absolute shit. And few of the opinion shows have any nuance. That’s one aspect at least where I would say it’s “both sides”.
The Kochs basically bought out PBS in order to block them from airing an anti-Koch documentary (which I saw, and honestly, it wasn’t very interesting).
I’m on the left side of the American political spectrum but CNN is pretty openly editorializing in its new coverage, even postTrump. It’s not openly, shamelessly dishonest the way a non-news outlet like OANN is, and it’s not yet as biased as Fox, but it’s bad.
I made the point earlier that CNN for the most part is not high quality journalism, so I basically agree that much of it sucks. But to imply as you do that it’s blatantly biased I think is unfair. Sure, it was heavily against Trump, but so was everyone except the nutcases. Right now, for instance, their major front-page article is about fact-checking Biden’s latest public address, and they found no shortage of things to criticize. So while there’s much wrong with CNN and I’m not going to defend them against legitimate criticism, let’s be factual about it …
It is blatantly biased. The fact that its bias lies in the direction of opposing the worst President in the history of the United States certainly means it’s not as dishonest as the Fox Newses of the world, but they do stretch the truth.
(That said, my biggest problem with CNN isn’t even that, it’s than half the time I click on an article headline, it takes me to a goddamned video. Type it out, guys. Anything worth knowing can be read much faster than it can be viewed.)
IMHO CNN had hands down the worst website of any major news organization. Maybe its a tad better these days, but I now have a real aversion to going there after one too many frustrating experiences.
The more a website posts video-only stories, the less hits it’ll likely get.
I have no way, at all, of empirically proving this - just going by the prudent, reasoned common sense of the lumpenproletariat.
I assume that their 24x7 US and international news networks are their bread and butter, and the website is just a sort of adjunct. So I suppose there’s a strong temptation to fill the website with videos that are just clips of their broadcast segments. Actually writing news stories isn’t their main expertise, although some of their published opinion pieces can be entertaining. Also, a great many of their web journalists can’t write. Some need grammar lessons, other need outright remedial English classes, and almost all just need a basic sense of how to write well. The most frustrating to me are the technology journalists who neither understand the technology nor are capable of coherently writing about it.
They’re fooled because Fox hosts deliberately misinform in order to reinforce biases that these viewers already have. The media don’t necessarily have a moral obligation to go on a crusade to change people’s worldview, but they do have a moral obligation to inform and educate people so that people develop informed opinions, regardless of what their worldviews are. Fox deliberately misinforms in part because they have a captive audience that they know well and can deliver to advertisers – that’s no doubt part of their equation. But they also obviously have ideological attachments and use their consumer base to create a misinformation ecosystem.
Surprised the hell of me went the CNN WH press pushed Jen Psaki on the crisis at the boarder. They even sent some reporters down to it. Seems like is a total nightmare for the kids and border patrol agents. Maybe they are trying to pull back on what they have become. When we lived overseas could wait to watch CNN , when it was offered.(in the lat 90s early 2000s)
In all honestly, this is true of Fox. They’re conservative because they saw a market opportunity there. If they could make more money by selling out the GOP they’d do it in a heartbeat.